So, I like rainbowy things and bright lights. There are a lot of modern keyboards, mice, and such which have color controls for what color they glow.

So I saw a shiny new high-end computer keyboard (Thermaltake’s “Challenger Ultimate”). The box shows the keyboard backlight shading smoothly from red through the rainbow to purple:

It has descriptive text at various places on the box:

“256 Individual Colors”

“Individual Color Switchable”

“Wizard 256 Back Light Design”.

In fact, what it has is: You can change the color of the backlighting of the whole keyboard to a single color. It can be any RGB value using the standard 24-bit color space. The “256 Individual Colors” refers, not to any kind of different lighting in different locations, but to a preset palette of 256 colors you can select from if you don’t want to manually pick the exact color you want.

I mean. It’s a niceish keyboard. It’s pretty. The LED lighting really is nice. It has a flexible macro system built into it. All that’s great. But… The word “individual” makes no sense here if it doesn’t mean that there are separate lights which can be configured separately.

Sooooo, back to the store to fuss at people.

(Side note: Their software, which hasn’t been updated in ages, is sort of chintzy at best, and not very well-designed, but it wins huge points over, say, Logitech’s, in that it’s not 20x as large as it needs to be.)